My Life in France
By Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme
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Reviews Mastering the art of life Laurie Muchnick April 16, 2006 MY LIFE IN FRANCE, by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. Knopf, 317 pp., $25.95. Two years after her death, Julia Child is having a career renaissance. The goofy, good-natured icon of television cookery, who introduced American home cooks to ambitious cuisine while giving us permission to make mistakes - remember the time she dropped an entire chicken on the floor, picked it up and kept going? - might be the perfect cook for our times, when many people are too busy for regular family dinners but want to produce restaurant-worthy meals on special occasions. But there is one way in which Child's books couldn't be more out of step with the culinary zeitgeist, and that's the fact that the food she loves is French: elaborate, heavily sauced French food. In the era of "Molto Mario" Batali, who was just on the cover of Time magazine; when the most popular restaurants in New York are low-key American places such as Union Square Cafe and traditional French restaurants such as Lutece are closing down, who would expect Julia Child to remain relevant? But she has. Last year saw the release of Child's original TV program, "The French Chef," on DVD, as well as the publication of "Julie and Julia," writer Julie Powell's memoir of cooking every recipe in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1" in a year while busily blogging about the experience. Now we have Child's own memoir, "My Life in France," written with her husband's nephew Alex Prud'homme and completed by him after her death, and it's everything you could have hoped for: Focusing mostly on the years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Julia and her husband Paul, an American diplomat, lived in France, the book records the transformation of a self-described "six-foot-two-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" into the author of the world's most authoritative compendium of French cuisine. It's hard to believe, but when the Childs arrived in Paris, Julia didn't know what a shallot was. It had never occurred to her to have wine with lunch, or any wine that cost more than $1.19. But she plunged into the world of food with her now-familiar gusto, eating out, learning to shop and generally educating herself. Unlike the stars of most current television food shows, Child was not a restaurant chef but a home cook; she prepared meals to please her husband and herself. She took classes at the Cordon Bleu, but they weren't enough for her, so she came home every day to continue her studies in her own kitchen. " became a bit of a Mad Scientist," she says. "I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and though no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating." All that experimentation paid off; Child's foolproof mayonnaise recipe was so revolutionary that years later, when she was working on her first cookbook, she sent it to her sister for testing marked "Confidential - To be kept under lock and key and never mentioned." Teaching herself to cook, discovering her own passion for knowledge, Child reminded me strangely of Julie Powell, who rescued herself from a dead-end job by cooking all of Child's recipes. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the original Julia is a much better writer than her acolyte; her descriptions of various meals she and Paul ate are simple but vivid. Here's Child eating sole meunière during her first lunch in France: "I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the brown butter. I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection." It's hard to tell how much of this book Child wrote herself, but after a few pages I let my guard down and got caught up in her wonderfully idiosyncratic voice. One of the most interesting things is hearing Child describe France the way people today might describe Italy: "Oh, how I adored sweet and natural France, with its human warmth, wonderful smells, graciousness, coziness, and freedom of spirit!" (When she went on vacation to Italy, she found the food unsophisticated.) This is the classic story of an American puritan moving to Europe and having her senses awakened; the fact that, thanks to her familiarity from TV, the reader can actually picture gawky Julia invading the Cordon Bleu, introducing herself to butchers and vegetable sellers and tableware merchants, infiltrating various groups dedicated to gourmet dining, makes her descriptions all that much more delightful. About a hundred pages into the book, Child meets Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, two Frenchwomen who had been working on a collection of French recipes for an American audience. By this time, Child feels confident enough to start a cooking school with her new friends, and eventually they ask her to join them in writing their book. I don't think it's only people with a professional interest in publishing who will be fascinated to follow the decade-long making of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," a book which has now been around for so long that it's easy to forget how revolutionary it was. Child makes everything from house-hunting to finding a publisher seem exciting; reading "My Life in France," I felt privileged to glimpse a portion of her wonderful life. Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
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